"The riptide of emotions". It's a phrase from Donna Farhi and it is a very accurate way of describing the experience.
Strong emotion sucks us in and before we even realise we're far from shore and in over our head and panicking about how we're going to survive and furious with ourselves for letting us get this deep AND STILL FEELING THE SURGING *rage/terror/regret/grief*. *Love* even, sometimes.
The riptide is never entirely pleasant, being in love is about as good as it gets but that's pretty much always mixed in with terror.
Rage can be satisfying for the time that it lasts. Rage is pretty good at obscuring your awareness of the fact you're being triggered too, until it dumps you *slam* on the rocks of "oh my god what did I just say".
Grief can be satisfying too, especially if it's feeling sorry for yourself. I remember it, but don't do it much any more. Radical responsibility. Grief can also be a way of feeling like you're honouring that which you've lost.
Then again, sometimes grief is just missing something that you loved that has gone, and that generally just sucks.
These emotions, they swirl around and wash over you and the thoughts they engender FEEL SO REAL. Until the waves of emotion ebb and your new shoreline emerges.
I have an image of a sandy shore, and our emotions as the sea. The shoreline is Who I Am. The STORY of Who I Am. The narrative of my substance and history that is written in the shape of my dunes, the flotsam and jetsam that has washed ashore, the climate.
And the story changes with every tide. Sometimes in massive ways.
A storm. A king tide. A tsunami. A slow wearing away of a particular rocky face. The crashing rocks that cannot hold after being undermined by wind and water for so long.
The new shore. The new shape. The dawn breaks and our story looks completely different.
The grains of sand are our experiences and memories.
The sea is our emotional state.
The weather is the world.
The little person playing on the shoreline is our small-s self experiencing our life. Building our sandcastles, playing with other people, digging for pippies, sunbaking, occasionally.
But there is something else there too. Underneath the sand, underneath the water, underneath the shifting and moving and changing and unreliable.
Something solid, old, true.
Bedrock. Hard, volcanic, iron-laden granitey bluestone rock.
Our Self. Self with a capital S.
If only we can remember that. Remain fixed on that. Hold on to that. EXPERIENCE THAT AS WELL.
We spend so much time in the small-s self space of ego and personality it is easy to forget that we are eternal, spirit, super-ego. That we will survive any experience*, even if our shoreline ends up a completely different place afterwards.
(*Barring death of the body, although I have my philosophies about that too which we'll go into some other time).
Leaning into the awareness, the experience of being the bedrock. Yoga is good for that, and meditation. Contemplation. Absorption.
Any practice that allows us to surrender our small-s self and become part of something larger.
PRACTICE going there. PRACTICE being there.
Practice the experience of being BEDROCK. Covered in sand, covered in water, covered with an atmosphere and climate. But there. Bedrock. Solid. Eternal.
Then practice being there WHILE THE WATERS WASH OVER YOU. Practice being sucked out far from shore by the riptide of your emotions and realise that beneath you is nothing but your Self.
You are safe. It is just the water. You are still here, underneath it. The bedrock has not shifted. The bedrock will hold you.
Swim back to shore. The bedrock is still fast.
